Bush's Pre-emptive Strategy Meets Some Untidy Reality

By DAVID E. SANGER

The New York Times

July 12, 2004

Even as President Bush turns his doctrine of pre-emptive action against powers
threatening the United States into a campaign theme, Washington is using a far
more subdued, take-it-slow approach to the dangers of unconventional weapons in
Iran and North Korea.

There are many reasons for the yawning gap between
Mr. Bush's campaign language and the reality. One of the most important is
woven throughout the searing, 511-page critique of the intelligence that led
America to war last year, released Friday by the Senate Intelligence
Committee.

The report details, in one painful anecdote after another,
misjudgments that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies made as they put
together what the committee called an "assumption train" about Iraq's nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons programs. That same train powered Mr. Bush's
own justification for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, down to his
now-discredited argument that the Iraqi leader was developing unmanned aerial
vehicles capable dropping biological weapons on American troops in the Mideast,
or perhaps even the United States itself.

The sweeping nature of that
report is already fueling a new debate over pre-emption, on the campaign trail
and among the nations the United States must convince as it builds its case
against North Korea and Iran. On Sunday, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican
chairman of the intelligence committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the
urgency of those problems meant there was not much time to fix the intelligence
community.

"Let's do it very quickly," he said, "because in a dangerous
world, if you're going to have a policy of pre-emption, whether it be North
Korea or whether it be whatever threat we face," including a possible terror
attack on the United States before the election, "we have to get it right."

Mr. Bush's aides say other countries are citing Iraq to make the argument
that America can never again be sure it is getting it right and thus must back
away from the pre-emption doctrine enshrined in Mr. Bush's 2002 "National
Security Strategy of the United States."

China has been the most
outspoken proponent of this view, suggesting publicly that the administration
cannot be trusted when it asserts that North Korea has secretly started up a
second nuclear weapons program one based on enriching uranium. Administration
officials say the Chinese are exploiting the Iraq findings for political
convenience, because finding a solution to the North Korean problem will be far
simpler if the evidence of a uranium program can be ignored.

"It hurts
us, there is no question," a senior aide to Mr. Bush conceded on Friday, as the
Senate report was published. "We already have the Chinese saying to us, `If you
missed this much in Iraq, how are we supposed to believe that the North Koreans
are producing nuclear weapons?' It just increases the pressure on us to prove
that we are right."

Iran is making a parallel argument. It admits even
boasts about its efforts to enrich uranium, which it hid for 17 years from
international inspectors until the evidence became overwhelming last year,
forcing the country into a reluctant confession. Now the Iranians argue that
the United States is riding another "assumption train," this time racing to the
conclusion Iran's real goal is making a weapon, rather than seeking an
alternative way to produce electricity.

In the cases of North Korea
and Iran, the basis for the American charges is far stronger than it was in
Iraq: Inspectors have seen and measured fissile material in both nations, and
visited facilities capable of making more.

Yet so far, the International
Atomic Energy Agency which in retrospect largely got it right in Iraq has
declined to back the United States. "We all think the American assessment is
probably right because there is no other good explanation for the Iranian
activities," one senior international diplomat involved in the search for
evidence in Iran said the other day. "But we still don't have the smoking gun."
He said that after the Iraq experience, "We need smoking guns more than ever."

In public, Mr. Bush's language about responding to threats is as black
and white as it was before his administration's case about the threat posed by
Mr. Hussein began to crumble.

"September the 11th, 2001, taught a
lesson I will never forget," Mr. Bush said recently while campaigning in
Cincinnati. Using a line that often turns up in his stump speech, he continued:
"America must confront threats before they fully materialize. In Iraq, my
administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a threat."

But,
in noncampaign contexts, Mr. Bush says there are many ways to disarm a country,
and on Monday he is going to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a
center of nuclear weapons technology, to speak about his counterterrorism
strategy. Oak Ridge is the repository of the centrifuges, raw uranium and other
nuclear equipment that the United States shipped out of Libya this year, in the
most conspicuous success story yet of how to disarm a country without attacking
it.

Mr. Bush is urging Iran and North Korea to follow the same path.
So far, neither has indicated it would. And so far, the president's aides say,
Mr. Bush has purposefully avoided making the kinds of threats that he made to
Iraq. One reason is a military reality: Iran could strike back against Israel
or American forces in the region, and North Korea could inflict huge damage on
Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

But Mr. Bush's position on Iran
and North Korea may also have something to do with election-year politics. His
challenger, Senator
John Kerry of Massachusetts, has made clear that he will make a major issue
of both the intelligence failures and what he termed in a recent interview the
administration's "foolhardy rush" to embrace a pre-emptive attack against
Iraq.

The Democratic Party platform is expected to include a sentence
declaring that the "doctrine of unilateral pre-emption has driven away our
allies," and Mr. Kerry argued in the interview that while he would reserve the
right to act pre-emptively, he would never make it a core doctrine of American
foreign policy.

Mr. Bush and his aides argue that would be a huge
mistake. In the old understanding of pre-emption, they argue, a country could
see an army massing and then decide whether to strike in advance. In the age of
terror, there would probably be no such obvious warning. Mr. Bush sees that as
a reason for broad presidential latitude. But it is more unclear than ever
before how any president can make that judgment with an intelligence system that
is widely viewed as badly broken.